The above video features Andy Crouch – editor of Christianity Today – talking about how Christians should understand, interact with and create culture.

I highly recommend taking 10 minutes to view it.

Christians should be about creating, contributing to and interacting with the culture (a term which he defines in this video), rather than seeking to control it. When we seek to control the culture – as we see is the goal of so many prominent Christians today – we typically don’t do a very good job.

To borrow a phrase from my new obsession with British television, “we muck it up.” Let’s stop mucking it up.

My friend, Joel, posted an interesting theory about the decline of the mainline church and the anti-intellectual streak within evangelical mainline enclaves.

How much better would we be if we had taught questioning our faith instead of absolute intellectual surrender when the New Atheists and Ken Ham arrived?

Essentially, he suggests that this “intellectual surrender” has forced the church to surrender credibility in order to maintain uniformity of thought. When a person with a question is told to “just believe” or that their question represents a lack of faith, why wouldn't that questioner find somewhere else to be? This is my paraphrase, but I think this is what he's saying.

I believe his theory to be correct, but insufficient.

We in the church must, first, disabuse (this word not used accidentally) ourselves of the notion that commercial success and the American Dream are synonymous with faithful Christianity.

They're so not.

They may even be the antithesis.

However, those who foster an unquestioning faith tend to experience the greater numeric church success.

Unless these ideas are separated by as much ground as we can get between them, the numeric success experienced by anti-intellectual evangelicalism will motivate the defense of the status quo – and his theory will wither on the vine.

A malpractice lawsuit has exposed the Catholic as a fraudulent, hypocritical, money-grubbing cult. One man has sued a Catholic hospital for malpractice in the death of his wife and unborn twins. When the pregnant woman was brought into the emergency room, a blood clot was on the verge of causing a massive heart attack. The

Yesterday, I had a Facebook message chat with a friend of mine. I will not tell you how close, but he is on the cusp of being ordained an elder in the United Methodist Church. We had always discussed what was bothering us about different aspects of the the church and the life of

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I could have just retweeted this. However, I have a blog that has this cool feature where I can embed what looks like Twitter right into the post. That aside, I know this tracks back to his book, but it still sounds like a plan. Simple churches have a clearly defined process that moves people

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